From: Bence Ferdinandy <bence@ferdinandy.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2024 10:39:28 GMT
Subject: branch description as a note?
Message-ID: <D68T28TFNW6N.2W0WV6WOUT6V0@ferdinandy.com>

Hi,

so I've been wondering about branch descriptions being just a local
configuration. The only use-case I know for them is generating cover letters
and request-pull, although I could imagine maybe the maintainer uses branch
descriptions for storing the - well - branch descriptions for the "What's
cooking" emails and the merge commit messages. 

Now my problem with the description being a local configuration, is that
I often work on patches on two different computers. I can easily share my patch
notes with myself, but not the branch description. If these could be pushed and
fetched like a note, I think that would open up some other nice possibilities
as well, like having a standard place for MR/PR messages for forges, sharing
proposed merge commit messages, maybe other things.

For my personal issue of sharing branch descriptions with myself, I could
probably just make up a convention for myself, say using refs/notes/branches,
but it would be nice to have this built in, instead of the local config branch
description.

From usage perspective I could imagine a new `--branch` flag for notes, which
would tell `git notes` to operate on notes attached to branches instead of
specific commits, probably stored under refs/notes/branches by default. Maybe
add an `--edit-branch-note` to `git branch`. And of course have the option to
use this note instead of the description configuration wherever it makes sense.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Bence